I can't comment on the quality per region, but I have to agree that the quality of the Zire 72 does leave something to be desired. We've had all sorts of strange problems with it. The largest observation I could make about the Zire 72 is that a lot of effort was put into adding new features, but without enough focus on stability of those features, or the overall device for that matter.
One of the stranger problems we've experienced (with more than one unit): we would leave a Zire 72 powered off and at full power, then come back the next day and all the data would be gone, as if it had run out of power. How could this have happened since it wasn't used during that period? A bit of detective work to catch this happening before complete power failure found that the Zire 72 was very hot to the touch, and powering on the device showed a "chunk overlocked" error message. Why were we receiving error messages from a powered off device which had no applications running on it at the time? Empirical trends and a bit of educated guessing would indicate that the problem stems from making use of the video capture facilities, since it tended to happen after the Zire 72 was used to take a video or two. Beyond the obvious annoyances with lost data, this is a bit disturbing - what if it could get hot enough to cause a fire? There have been other strange problems as well, such as Palm Desktop randomly choosing which data to synchronize. Without changing settings, on one HotSync, all new videos would be transferred, then the next time new videos were taken, none of the new videos would be transferred. Besides stability of the software, even the external physical features don't seem terribly well thought out. The location of the "Voice Memo" suggests either a good sense of humor on the part of the developer responsible, or a lack of testing with real users. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say that every user we've had on the Zire 72 has hit that button by accident multiple times, enough that I've disabled it in our application to cut down on the annoyance of accidentally entering the "Voice Memo" application repeatedly. The paint around the stylus holder starts chipping very quickly and within a week or two of use looks pretty tacky. The lack of a HotSync cradle was something our users complained about immediately, and this wasn't helped by the slot for the USB cable being a little on the unfriendly side. We've had more strange issues like this, but I think I've already gotten to the root of the problem above: too much focus on new features (especially flashy ones), and not enough focus on quality control. Adrien. Monday, June 14, 2004, 7:06:34 AM, you wrote: a> The palm device (e.g:Zire72,TE ...) quality is very bad in China.I don't a> know what it is on the others countries. a> Clie devices were made in China,too,but it is better than palm. a> I'm ready to buy Dell X3,and give up supporting palm. -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
